ATHOS, Mount

ATHOS, Mount. Known as the Holy Mountain, Athos is a peninsula in northeastern Greece out into the Aegean Sea approximately one hundred miles southeast of Thessalonica (q.v.). Established by the Emperor Nicephorus Phocas in 963 under the leadership of St. Athanasius (q.v.) as the exclusive property of the monks, the world’s only “monastic republic” has endured the vicissitudes of Byzantium’s fall, the depredations of the Crusades (qq.v.), the relatively benign neglect of the Turkish Sultans, and since 1912 the perhaps more dangerous designs of the modern state of Greece. It has been the largest concentration of Orthodox monks virtually since its inception. Its twenty monasteries are: the Great Lavra of Athanasios of Athos (963), Vatopedi (10th c.), Agiou Paulou (10th c.), Iveron (10th c., orginally Georgian), Xeropotamou (10th c.), Ephigmenou (11th c.), Panteleimon (11th c., Russian), Docheiariou (11th c.), Xenophontos (11th c.), Constamonitou (11th c.), Caracallou (11th c.), Philotheou (12th c.), Hilandar (12th c., Serbian), Koutloumousiou (12th c.), Pantokrator (12th c.), Simonos Petras (13th c.), Dionysiou (13th c.), Gregoriou (13th c.), Zographou (13th c., Bulgarian), and Stavronikita (16th c.). Over the past millennium of its existence, Athos has been of incalculable importance for the Orthodox oikoumene (q.v.), marked by two great revivals: the first in the 14th c. and 15th c., characterized by the writings of Gregory Palamas and the Orthodox-wide movement of hesychasm (qq.v.), and second during the 18th c. and 19th c., which saw the publication of the Philokalia by Nicodemus the Athonite in Greek and Paisii Velichkovsky (qq.v.) in Slavic and Romanian. These two periods have indelibly imprinted the life and thought of the Orthodox Church. The present modest revival of monastic life, very much in the spirit of its predecessors, began in 1968 and may well bring the same kind of benefits to the whole Church.

The benefits Athos gives the Church are not easily summarized. It produced no universities, no enduring institutions, nor, while contributing a number of bishops and the occasional patriarch over the centuries, has it established any succession of reforming hierarchs akin to the progeny of the early medieval monastery of Cluny, which changed the face of the Western Church and of Europe in general. The Holy Mountain’s gifts to Orthodoxy are altogether of the intangible variety, perhaps best summed up by an epithet for it popular among some of the monks: “the Mountain of silence.” The silence in question is that of theophany (q.v.), of the divine presence, and the saints who have come out of that presence in an unfailing stream are the sum and entirety of Athos’s gift to the Church. Rightly, the latter has always prized this contribution beyond any other. The glory of God, to paraphrase St. Irenaeus (q.v.), is the human person radiant in the Spirit. Athos has, over its thousand years, provided time and again the proof of the Spirit’s presence in a sorry world; and that, at least for Orthodox Christians of the past fifty generations, is enough and more. (See Ascesis; Monasteries; Monasticism.)